Apparently, the finalists of this category must be bloggers that complain a great deal about their children and even find great joy in abandoning escaping from their children. In fact, I think that publishing a lot of posts that make you look as if you regret ever having said children are prerequisite to be a finalist in the "Best Parenting Blog." Some of them are humorous, I suppose. Oh...and I forogt, foul language also seems to help your chances of being a finalist in the "Best Parenting Blog." I'll keep all of this in mind for next year's awards, I guess.
I'm sure they really do love their children. But something in our culture is uncomfortable with people talking about how much they love their children. Our culture prefers to hear people talking about their children as though they were demon possessed, greedy little parasites sucking up their parents' lives, brain cells, energy, and creativity, swallowing it whole in one gulp and then screaming, "Sssssssssluuuuuuuuuurp. Now I vill have your soul!"
Not to mention the checkbook, credit cards, and car keys.
Ethnic slurs are out, but rug rats, ankle biters, and spawn- those are acceptable words for those people to whom we owe protection, care, and tender affection. I know, I know. It's just a joke. It's just funny. And the worst thing about it is that it is often funny. I laugh, too. I laugh at other inappropriate things, too, because my sense of humour is not the most redeemed and sanctified part of me. What we forget is that demeaning other human beings should not be funny, and that what we think of as funny is subjective. We learn that these things are funny. There was a time when the word we call in our family 'The 'N' word was 'funny,' too, and still is with some groups of people. We don't find that admirable. The 'N' word is, in our family, a vile word. Had we been born a handful of decades earlier, maybe we'd have thought it was funny, just like the rest of our culture.
Oddly enough, at the same time we talk about our children as though they were gum on the bottom of our shoes, we refuse to take any responsiblity for their behavior, permit them to run wild in grocery stores, kick fellow passengers on airlines, shriek for (and receive) toys at the mall, and just generally behave like little tasmanian devils. When other people request that we not permit our children to ruin their clothing, places of business, or evening out, we react in anger- towards those people- as though they were being unreasonable by expecting children to behave as though somebody cared enough about them to teach them some manners. Or maybe it's not all that odd that we allow children to run wild and act like little animals and then find them annoying enough to be around that we make jokes referring them as rodents and demonic little pests nipping at our ankles.
We don't want to take the trouble to teach them to behave, so we get children who have no idea that they might be able to control themselves and be considerate of other people, so then we call them names and snicker amongst ourselves about what selfish little beasts our children are- and we're the ones who encourage that behavior in the first place!!
Isn't that a lovely cultural trait?
And that soapbox, my friends, is collapsing beneath my weight, so I'll move on before I fall off.
So let's get to the topic mentioned in the title of this post- Mom Is Right tells us that her friends from Gleeson Bloglomerate are in the finals, and it appears to me that the Glesson family are indeed homeschoolers.
The Gleeson Bloglomerate is a finalist in BEST BLOG DESIGN, and Sean Gleeson is a finalist in the top 1751-2500 Blogs. If you click on the link to the Glesson Bloglomerate and look over in the top left corner, they give directions for voting for them in both categories. I should mention that I found the Gleason blog surprisingly PG-13 at times (there are some rotating pictures at the top), but then, we all know that I'm rather prudish.=)
Another homeschooled blog in the finalists is the Rebelution, the work of Greg Harris' twins. They are in the finals for the top 1001 - 1750 Blogs (click on their link to see how to vote).
It looks to me like one of the Rebelution's competition, The Glittering EYe, is also a homeschooler. I base that on this post and this one, where he seems to talk about homeschooling in the first person.
I thought I remembered that a blogger who writes with one of the blogs in one of the upper tier awards is also a homeschooler, but I could not find anything to support my feeble memory on that blog- so I'm not specifying which one that was here. But if you know of any other homeschoolers in the WEblog awards, let us know.
To be honest, we wouldn't vote for any of these just because they are homeschoolers. They are either the best in their category or they are not. But homeschooling blogs are more likely to cover subjects of particular interest to me, and that does influence my view of what is 'best.'
Personally, I love the term "yard apes" for small fry.
ReplyDeleteSomebody once told me that was a racial slur, which boggled my mind. Still don't see how that one works... but then, I always thought "gypped" was spelled with a J, which takes it away from its racist roots into sheer colloquialism. So maybe "yard apes" was a slur at some point but is now so divorced from its original context that unconscious users could get blasted with racism charges for something innocent...